Lovable Head of Growth on The New AI-Native Growth Playbook | Elena Verna | E279

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable—the fastest-growing AI startup to ever surpass $100M in ARR, hitting the milestone in just eight months. With a proven track record leading growth at Miro, Amplitude, Superhuman, and Dropbox, Elena brings unparalleled expertise in driving sustainable, product-led growth across both hyper-growth and turnaround environments.

Elena shares how building in the fast-moving “vibe coding” category requires a radical shift in how we define product-market fit, structure growth teams, and measure success. From product-led monetization loops to redefining brand as a product responsibility, Elena outlines a bold vision for what growth looks like in the age of AI-native products.

What you’ll learn:

• How Lovable ships at record speed, with daily product updates and a 3-tier launch model.
• How AI-native products redefine activation, retention, and monetization.
• Why product teams must now own brand experience—not just features
• How Elena designs feedback, education, and referral loops that turn users into growth engines.
• The evolving role of activation, retention, and monetization in AI-native PLG.

Key Takeaways 👇

• Velocity as a Moat: Why rapid shipping is a survival strategy in AI-first companies.
• Always-Evolving PMF: How Lovable redefines product-market fit weekly in a category shaped by fast-moving LLMs.
• Product-Led Brand: Why every product touchpoint must be “lovable”—and how that standard powers word-of-mouth loops.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Elena Verna 

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Transcript

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:00:00

In AI, product market fit is an elusive concept. Your place is not guaranteed, even if you're making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Anybody can enter the playing field and start competing with you. It becomes an ongoing battle to recapture product market fit. We're well over $100 million in revenue, but I don't feel like we have it in the bag. I actually don't even feel like we have product market fit yet. We had it last month, and three months ago, but the definition of product market fit in the vibe coding category is changing every single week. In AI product, you only have a chat box, and all of your activation experience happens through your conversation with an agent. I think retention in our world of AI is going to make or break companies.

Introduction

Carlos González | Product School 00:00:56

Hey, this is Carlos, CEO at Product School, and your host on The Product Podcast. Today’s guest is Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, the most popular AI prototyping tool that lets anyone build websites or mobile apps from scratch using natural language prompts—no code required. In under eight months, Lovable became the fastest company in history to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Before Lovable, Elena helped scale some of the world's most iconic companies, including Dropbox, Amplitude, MongoDB, Miro, and SurveyMonkey.

Carlos González | Product School 00:01:46

In this episode, we dig into how product managers can "vibe code" and use AI agents to turn ideas into production-ready applications, the new growth principles defining AI-native companies, best practices for answer engine optimization, and why brand is the new moat—even more powerful than growth or monetization. This is one of my favorite episodes of all time, packed with insights from one of the sharpest minds in product growth. Let's dive in.

Main Conversation

Carlos González | Product School 00:01:57

Elena, you are one of the people with the most appearances at Product School by popular demand. Thank you for being back again.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:02:07

Thank you for having me. I can't believe I'm doing the rounds, but yes, let's finish the full circle. I need my certificate!

Carlos González | Product School 00:02:30

You are now Head of Growth at Lovable, which is very fitting, because it is probably one of the fastest-growing companies—the fastest company to ever hit $100 million in ARR, doing it within eight months. You’ve done growth at legendary companies: Miro, Amplitude, Superhuman, Dropbox. What is different this time?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:02:58

This is actually the first company where I'm trying to catch up to the growth that is naturally happening in the market. Most of my roles in previous companies, except for Miro, have been re-accelerating or stabilizing growth away from decline. It's actually very easy to do growth in a company that is already organically growing and operating in "fast-moving waters" where the category is expanding.

At Lovable, it’s a very different role. It reminds me of the Miro days during the hyper-growth stage, but the job is different. The category is just taking you because there is so much hype around the tool, so you can almost do no wrong. All you have to do here is remove barriers to growth.

Vibe Coding: A New Category

Carlos González | Product School 00:04:17

When you use the term "category," how do you define the current category for Lovable?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:04:22

I'll define it fairly simply: Vibe Coding. What vibe coding becomes as a category is still unclear because the capabilities of what AI can do are changing every single week. Our product gets better simply because LLMs are getting better.

Vibe coding is starting to swallow some of the older, existing categories like website building, no-code tools, and internal tooling. Vibe coding is actually a better solution for all of that. But what it actually is going to be defined as a year from now? Who knows.

Carlos González | Product School 00:05:19

There are so many vibe coding companies popping up like mushrooms, and they all seem to be winning. They’re all raising capital and generating revenue. It reminds me of the early days of product analytics with Amplitude or Miro. At some point, they had to expand. How do you see the opportunity to expand from vibe coding into an end-to-end platform?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:05:57

The interesting piece with Lovable is that when you look at a traditional tech company, the reason you needed so much vertical focus was that product building was complicated. You had to have interfaces, marketing materials, and educational materials. With an AI company, the agent solves for so much of it.

As a product, the only interface you have with the customer is a prompt box. So all of those vertical use cases are solved more with your training of an agent. You don't necessarily have to build the entire interface. There's less need for vertical focus; you can go more horizontally right from the beginning because the agent is conversing with you and doing the education on your behalf.

I think software is going to go into complete micro-SaaS development. The barrier to building software is going down. I can go in and create any app that I ever wanted; I don't need to go buy it.

The Platform Question: OpenAI vs. Vertical Solutions

Carlos González | Product School 00:08:47

When I think about the term platform, you have the mega-platforms like OpenAI. They recently announced they are building their own agent automation platform, potentially swallowing a category like Zapier. How do you think of that as competition?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:09:21

We need to see where OpenAI wants to compete. We can look at Google—they tried to go into many verticals, like social with Google Circles, and failed. It’s an existential question for OpenAI: are they going to be a platform, or are they going to be the solutions?

I think OpenAI is naturally going to go into some vertical specializations, but the question is how much distinct training do these agents need? You cannot crowdsource that expertise; it requires specialty instructions loaded into it. To specifically pick website building only doesn't fully make sense, because the delta between website building versus an app with a frontend and backend is just too close now.

Principle 1: PMF is a Treadmill

Carlos González | Product School 00:11:50

I want to play a game with you based on one of your previous posts where you talk about how the old growth playbook is dead. You came up with new principles. First one: PMF is a treadmill.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:12:18

When you think about the traditional lifecycle of a company, you reach product market fit, you scale, and you hit a threshold. Interestingly enough, at Lovable—even with over $100 million in revenue—I don't feel like we have it in the bag.

The definition of product market fit in the vibe coding category is changing every single week because LLMs are getting better and customer expectations are changing like there's no tomorrow. This is the fastest habitual change in our customers that we've ever seen. In AI, product market fit is an elusive concept. Your place is not guaranteed. Anybody can enter the playing field and compete. It becomes an ongoing battle to recapture product market fit. There is no such thing as "you hit it, then you scale it." You are constantly trying to hit it again.

Principle 2: Velocity is Survival

Carlos González | Product School 00:14:41

What I imagine is very hard is learning while you are winning. How do you maintain that beginner's mindset?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:14:52

You don't really have a chance to learn much because everything is changing so quickly. You have to act on intuition and have the right vision. If the technology is there and you aren't using it, you've already lost the game because someone else will capitalize on it.

You have to pick a target, sprint towards it, and learn along the way, knowing that the moment you reach the destination, the goalpost has changed. The shipping velocity at Lovable is something I've never seen at any other company, but it becomes a means of survival.

Carlos González | Product School 00:17:58

What is that velocity?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:18:02

We ship things every single day. We don't have two-week sprints. We push to production on the minute. We have an internal "shipped" channel, and I’m in there all the time asking, "What did we release today?"

We tier our releases:

• Tier 1: Big moments every three months (e.g., Cloud launch).
• Tier 2: Cool features, like voice mode.
• Tier 3: Fixes, optimizations, and tweaks to make the experience better every single day.

Principle 3: Growth isn't Responsible for Activation

Carlos González | Product School 00:19:19

The next principle: Growth isn't really responsible for activation anymore. The core interaction is often stripped down.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:19:38

I had an epiphany talking to Kieran from HubSpot. I've spent so much time preaching that the growth team should be responsible for activation—that "aha moment." But at Lovable, after two months, I realized I hadn't touched activation.

In an AI product, you only have a chat box. All of your activation experience is happening via your conversation with an agent. What are you going to optimize? It actually becomes the core product's responsibility to activate people appropriately through that agentic conversation.

I work on product-led loops, monetization, and retention. But for activation, core product owns it. It works so much better when it's not offloaded to the growth team because it makes the core product stronger.

Principle 4: Brand is the New Moat

Carlos González | Product School 00:23:25

For someone so data-driven, what is your take on the role of brand?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:23:32

Brand has become a product exercise. Lovable doesn't have brand marketing. We haven't spent on brand channels. Yet, people say we have a strong brand. Why? Because you need to stand out through your product experience. Every single touchpoint must communicate your brand.

We have an internal saying: "Is this experience lovable?" If something is unlovable, it's all hands on deck to fix it. Experiencing brand through product is a superpower and a moat. It activates word of mouth. Product managers now have to be responsible for brand—buckle up.

Principle 5: The Old Growth Playbook is Dead

Carlos González | Product School 00:27:05

Next one: The old growth marketing playbook doesn't hold. SEO + Paid + Content is no longer enough.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:27:13

I can only apply about 30% of what I know from traditional marketing playbooks. The biggest differences I see are:

1. Word of Mouth: This is the way to cut through the noise.
2. Founder Social: It is incredibly important for CEOs and employees to be vocal about what they are building. Our CEO, Anton, is very active on social, and it's a gift that keeps on giving. It’s an organic channel far stronger than SEO.
3. Creator Economy: This is absolutely booming. It’s not just B2C; YouTube is huge for B2B products right now. That is where the eyeballs are.
4. AI Search: How you show up in ChatGPT is nebulous but critical.

Principle 6: Channels are Collapsing

Carlos González | Product School 00:31:33

You gave a talk about how distribution channels are collapsing. What is a good way to get a first-mover advantage?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:32:00

On the channels I just mentioned, there is no first-mover advantage anymore—that’s just where the game is. To find an advantage, you have to look at new releases from large platforms.

For example, OpenAI just opened their app store where they will pull in products to perform tasks as customers chat. That is new. That is the first time you can show up as a product in a chat experience. If you want a first-mover advantage, you should be jumping on those opportunities super fast.

Traditional channels like search and social are collapsing. Social is clamping down on linking out. Search is shifting to conversational AI. You have to keep your eyes open all the time.

Principle 7: Marketing Can't Keep Up

Carlos González | Product School 00:34:20

You said Marketing can't keep up with shipping velocity.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:34:28

All our marketing processes were created for teams that shipped once a month. With AI-native velocity, shipping every day, there is no lead time. My team picks up a task, and an hour later, it's done. Marketing says, "We need a couple of weeks." That doesn't exist anymore.

If you hear the phrase "You can't release, marketing is not ready," have a deep heart-to-heart with your team. Marketing is in a big scramble trying to figure out how to support this velocity. I think engineers are becoming marketers now too because they handle their own GTM strategies for releases.

Principle 8: The GTM Engineer

Carlos González | Product School 00:36:57

How are you thinking about the role of the GTM Engineer?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:36:57

I see the GTM Engineer materializing in two ways:

1. Replacing Sales Roles: A combination of BDR, SDR, AE, and Success wrapped into one person. A generalist handling the full cycle.
2. Replacing RevOps: Piping everything together for GTM to run faster.
   It comes back to the concept of wearing multiple hats. With such rapid iteration, you can't afford specialists. You need generalists.

Principle 9: Growth Ships Features

Carlos González | Product School 00:38:18

You said Growth ships features now. How does that work with the core product team?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:38:32

I’ve spent my entire career saying growth does not ship features; we work on distribution. But because of our shipping velocity and trust in developers, we have room to take on feature work. If we believe a feature will improve retention, we just go and create it.

We have a dedicated growth engineering team that reports to our CTO but is 100% dedicated to growth efforts. We still coordinate with Core, but if we see an opportunity, we execute.

Bonus Principles: Product & Retention

Carlos González | Product School 00:40:22

Is there any bonus principle we haven't touched on yet?

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:40:26

Two bonus principles:

1. Great product is still the best way to grow. It’s no longer enough to just ship an experience; you have to ship an amazing experience. Core product can participate in growth by being mindful of the quality they put out.
2. Retention will make or break AI companies. I used to advocate heavily for activation, but in the AI era, retention is everything. We are living in a hype cycle. The only companies that will succeed are the ones with above-benchmark retention rates. If your growth team is only focused on acquisition, you’re going to die.

Closing

Carlos González | Product School 00:43:09

Thank you, Elena, for being on the show and breaking down the new growth playbook.

Elena Verna | Lovable 00:43:12

Thank you for having me, appreciate it.